Epicurus (341-270 BC) was, with Plato and Aristotle,
one of the three great philosophers of the ancient world. He
developed an integrated system of ethics and natural philosophy that,
he claimed and many accepted, showed everyone the way to a life of
the greatest happiness. The school that he founded remained open for
798 years after his death. While it lost place during the last 200
of these years, his philosophy held until then a wide and often
decisive hold on the ancient mind.

The revival of Epicureanism in the 17th century coincided with the
growth of scientific rationalism and classical liberalism. There can
be no doubt these facts are connected. It may, indeed, be argued
that the first was a leading cause of the second two, and that we
are now living in a world shaped, in every worthwhile sense, by the
ideas of Epicurus.

Life and Times

Epicurus was born on the 4th February 341 BC on
Samos, an island in the Aegean close by the coast of what is now
Turkey. Because he was the son of colonists from that city, he was
called to Athens at the age of 18 for two years of compulsory
military service. With this exception, he devoted his entire life to
teaching and writing.(1)

His philosophical education began with Pamphilus, a follower of
Plato, and ended with Nausiphanes, a follower of Democritus. He
taught for a while in the school his father had established on
Samos. In 311-10, he taught at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. He
then taught for a while at Lampsacus, a city not far from what
became Constantinople. He returned to Athens in 306, where he
founded a school known as the Garden. Here he remained, teaching and
writing, until he died from infected kidney stones in 270 at the age
of 71. He died unmarried and without children.

His life overlaps what modern historians call the Classical and the
Hellenistic periods of ancient history. He was born in a Greece that
was divided, as it always had been, into many city states. None was
larger than an English county. Few had a population of more than
30,000. Each was or sought to be a universe in itself, claiming the
total commitment of its citizens and acknowledging no higher source
of civil or religious authority. This world was bounded to the east
by the decayed but still significant Persian Empire, and to the
north by the rising but still mostly distant kingdom of Macedon.
Rome was a small city state continually at war with its neighbours
in central Italy. It was almost unknown to the Greeks of the Aegean.

In the year that Epicurus was born, Plato had been dead for six
years, Aristotle was 43 and had another 19 years to live, and
Alexander the Great was 15.

In the year of his death, Alexander had been dead for 53 years, and
had conquered most of the known world, including the Persian Empire,
and had spread Greek dominion and Greek civilisation from Libya to
India. Some city states remained independent, but had now to survive
in a world of giant empires ruled by Greek despots and Greek
bureaucracies. The bond between city and citizen had been at least
weakened. It was being replaced by a heightened sense of
individuality, and above this by the notion of a common Greek
nationality  and even by an emerging notion of a common humanity.

Six years after his death, the Romans began the first of their three
wars with Carthage that would, within another century, leave them as
the dominant power in the Mediterranean.

Relating what people think to what is happening around them is never
easy, and our knowledge of the ancient world is not sufficient to
claim anything with confidence. And the circumstances in which a
philosopher lives have no bearing on the truth of what he writes.
But Epicurus lived through the beginning of an age that was to be
unusually favourable to the spread of his doctrines.

Sources of Information

Before discussing what these doctrines were,
however, I need to explain our sources of information for Epicurus
and his school. According to Diogenes Laertius, Epicurus himself was
the most prolific of all the main ancient philosophers. His total
original writings filled 300 papyrus rolls.(2) If we take one
papyrus roll as containing the equivalent of 30 printed octavo
pages, his collected works would fill 30 modern volumes. His longest
single work, On Nature, filled 37 papyrus rolls, which makes it
about as long as Das Kapital.

To these original writings, we must add the various writings of his
followers, both during his life and during the following six
centuries or so. These also were substantial. Taken together, they
must easily have filled a library.

Moreover, unlike its main rivals, Epicureanism was a proselytising
philosophy. There were no hidden teachings  no mysteries too
complex for the written word. There was no need for long preparatory
studies in logic and mathematics and rhetoric before the meaning of
the Master could become plain. No one was too old or too young to
embrace the truths taught by Epicurus. He accepted slaves and even
women to the courses he ran in the Garden. He wrote in the plainest
Greek consistent with precise expression of his doctrines.(3) He discouraged his followers from poetry and rhetoric.

For those able or inclined to study his doctrines in full, there
were the many volumes of On Nature. For those not so able or
inclined, there was a still substantial abridgement, and then a
shorter summary. For the less attentive or the uneducated, there
were collections of very brief sayings  whole arguments compressed
into statements that could be memorised and repeated.

Nearly all of these works have vanished. Of what Epicurus himself
wrote, we have three complete letters and a list of brief sayings
known as the Principal Doctrines. Of other Epicurean writings, we
have the Vatican Sayings, which is another collection of brief
statements, some by Epicurus. We have a biography of Epicurus by
Diogenes Laertius, which summarises his main doctrines and also
contains the only extant whole works already mentioned. We have more
of the brief statements and a partial summary of the whole system
inscribed at the expense of another Diogenes on a wall in Oenoanda, a
city in what is now northern Turkey.

There are the elaborate refutations of Epicureanism by Cicero and
Plutarch. These inevitably outline and sometimes even quote what
they are attacking. There are hundreds of other references to
Epicurus in the surviving literature of the ancient world. Some of
these are useful sources of information. Some are our only sources
of information on certain points of the philosophy.

During the past few centuries, scholars have been trying to read the
charred papyrus rolls from a library in Herculaneum buried by the
eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Some of these contain works by
Philodemus of Gadara, an Epicurean philosopher of the 1st century BC.
Much of this library remains unexcavated, and most of the rolls
recovered have not really been examined. There are hopes that a
complete work by Epicurus will one day be found here.

Above all else, though, is the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius. He was
a Roman poet who died around the year 70 BC. His epic, in which he
claims to restate the physical doctrines of Epicurus, was unfinished
at the time of his death, and it is believed that Cicero himself
edited the six completed books and published the text roughly as it
has come down to us. This is one of the greatest poems ever written,
and perhaps the strangest of all the great poems. It is also the
longest explanation in a friendly source of the physical theories of
Epicurus.

Therefore, if anyone tries to say in any detail what Epicurus
believed, he will not be arguing from strong authority. If we
compare the writings of any extant philosopher with the summaries
and commentaries, we can see selective readings and exaggerations
and plain misunderstandings. How much of what Karl Marx really said
can be reliably known from the Marxist and anti-Marxist scholars of
the 20th century? Even David Hume, who wrote very clearly in a very
clear language, seems to have been consistently misunderstood by his
19th century critics. For Epicurus, we may have reliable information
about the main points of his ethics and his physics. We have almost
no discussions of his epistemology or his philosophy of mind. Anyone
who tries writing on these is largely guessing.

All this being said, enough has survived to make a general account
of the philosophy possible. Epicurus appears to have been a
consistent thinker. Though it may only ever be a guess  unless the
archaeologists in Herculaneum find the literary equivalent of
Tutankhamen's tomb  we can with some confidence proceed from what
Epicurus did say to what he might have said. Certainly, we can give
a general account of the philosophy.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Epicurus begins with the question asked by
Socrates at the end of the fifth century  what is the good life?
His answer is that the good lies not in virtue or justice or wisdom
 though these are not to be ignored  but in happiness.

"Pleasure" he writes," is our first and kindred good. It is the
starting point of every choice and every aversion, and to it we come
back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of
every good thing."(4)

Now we have more than enough of Epicurus to know that he is not
arguing for what are called the self-indulgent pleasures  of eating
and drinking and sex and the like. Aristippus of Cyrene (c435-366 BC),
we are told, had already argued for these. He also claimed that
happiness was the highest good, but went on to claim that happiness
lay in the pursuit of pleasure regardless of convention or the
feelings of others or of the future.

This interpretation was attached to Epicurus in his own lifetime,
and the attachment has been maintained down to the present  so that
the words "Epicure" and "Epicurean" have the meaning of
self-indulgent luxury.

What Epicurus plainly means by happiness is the absence of pain. We
are driven to act by a feeling of discontent. We seek food because
we are hungry. We seek warmth because we are cold. We seek medicine
because we are sick. Once we have acted correctly and removed the
cause of discontent, we are happy.

Turning to his own words, he says:

When we say... that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the
pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are
understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice or wilful
misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the
body and of trouble in the soul. It is not by an unbroken succession
of drinking bouts and of revelry, not by sexual lust, nor the
enjoyment of fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which
produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the
grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs
through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul. Of
this the beginning and the greatest good is wisdom. Therefore wisdom
is a more precious thing than even philosophy; from it springs all
the other virtues, for it teaches that we cannot live pleasantly
without living wisely, honourably and justly; nor live wisely,
honourably and justly without living pleasantly.(5)

In this scheme, therefore, happiness is to be defined as peace of
mind, or ataraxia. This pursuit of happiness does involve bodily
pleasure, but such pleasure is a means to the greater end of
ataraxia. "No pleasure" he says," is a bad thing in itself, but the
things which produce certain pleasures entail disturbances many
times greater than the pleasures themselves."(6)

His ethics of pleasure can be summarised as:

The pleasure which produces no pain is to be embraced. The pain
which produces no pleasure is to be avoided. The pleasure is to be
avoided which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater
pain. The pain is to be endures which averts a greater pain, or
secures a greater pleasure.(7)

And so the happy man for Epicurus is one who lives simply within his
means, who seeks only those pleasures which contribute to his long
term peace of mind.

And while hedonism is ultimately a doctrine of selfishness, what
Epicurus had in mind was not a life spent in the pursuit of solitary
happiness. He says: "Of the means which wisdom acquires to ensure
happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is
friendship."(8)

It may be that we seek friendship for selfish reasons. But
friendship is to be persistently sought and maintained throughout
life. Epicurus himself had an immense capacity for friendship.

A Scandalised Reception

This is a very brief overview of his ethical
teachings. Hedonism has always been a controversial doctrine, so far
as it is opposed to the teachings of the explicitly altruistic
philosophies and religious systems. There are difficulties with
hedonism when it comes to the exact comparison of pleasures. We do
not have any of the more detailed works in which Epicurus might have
attempted what Jeremy Bentham later called a "felicific calculus."
But, bearing in mind the difficulties that Bentham and the 19th
century utilitarians found when they tried to move from principles
to details, there is no reason to suppose he was more successful.

However, it is hard to see anything so scandalous in the pursuit of
happiness through moderation and through friendship that should have
brought on a flood of often hysterical denunciation and
misrepresentation in antiquity that began in his own lifetime and
did not end even with the loss of virtually the whole body of
Epicurean writings.

The early accusations are very detailed, and are cited by Diogenes
Laertius. Among much else, it is alleged:

That he wrote 50 obscene letters;
That one of his brothers was a
pimp;
That his understanding of philosophy was small and his
understanding of life even smaller;
That he put forward as his own
the doctrines of Democritus about atoms and of Aristippus about
pleasure;
That in his On Nature Epicurus says the same things over
and over again and writes largely in sheer opposition to others,
especially against his former teacher Nausiphanes;
That he was not a
genuine Athenian;
That he vomited twice a day from
over-indulgence.(9)

What does make Epicurus and his philosophy so
controversial is one further piece of advice on the pursuit of
happiness. It is impossible to be happy, he insists, unless we
understand the nature of the universe and our own place within the
universe.

Three centuries after his death, Plutarch (46-127 AD) wrote against
him in almost hysterical tone. He says:

Epicurus.... actually advises a cultivated monarch to put up with
recitals of stratagems and with vulgar buffooneries at his drinking
parties sooner than with the discussion of problems in music and
poetry.(10)

And again:

Colotes himself, for another, while hearing a lecture of Epicurus on
natural philosophy, suddenly cast himself down before him and
embraced his knees; and this is what Epicurus himself writes about
it in a tone of solemn pride: "You, as one revering my remarks on
that occasion, were seized with a desire, not accounted for by my
lecture, to embrace me by clasping my knees and lay hold of me to
the whole extent of the contact that is customarily established in
revering and supplicating certain personages. You therefore caused
me," he says, "to consecrate you in return and demonstrate my
reverence." My word! We can pardon those who say that they would pay
any price to see a painting of that scene, one kneeling at the feet
of the other and embracing his knees while the other returns the
supplication and worship. Yet that act of homage, though skillfully
contrived by Colotes, bore no proper fruit: he was not proclaimed a
Sage. Epicurus merely says: "Go about as one immortal in my eyes,
and think of me as immortal too."(11)

Now, all this and more was said against Epicurus when the whole body
of his writings was still available, and by men who had access to
those writings. It is unlikely, bearing in mind their general
ability, that they were incapable of understanding plain Greek. So
what could have been their motivation for misrepresenting him in
defiance of the evidence, or in repeating personal libels irrelevant
to his philosophy?

A possible answer is that they hated his philosophy for other
reasons that they were not able or did not wish fully to discuss.

What does make Epicurus and his philosophy so controversial is one
further piece of advice on the pursuit of happiness. It is
impossible to be happy, he insists, unless we understand the nature
of the universe and our own place within the universe.(12)

The Maintenance of Social Control

The central problem of almost every society before
about 1950 has been how to reconcile the great majority to
distributions of property in which they are at a disadvantage. Only
a minority has even been able to enjoy secure access to abundant
food and good clothing and clean water and healthcare and education.
Whether actually enslaved or formally free sellers of labour, the
majority have always had to look up to a minority of the rich and
often legally privileged. How to keep them quiet?

Force can only ever be part of the answer. The poor have always been
the majority, and sometimes the great majority. Armies of
mercenaries to protect the rich have not always been available, and
they have never by themselves been sufficient to compel obedience on
all occasions in every respect.

Force, therefore, has always been joined by religious terrors. In
Egypt, the king was a god, and the privileged system of which he was
the head was part of a divine order that the common people were
enjoined never to challenge. In the other monarchies of the near
east, the king might not actually be a god. But all the priests
taught that he was part of a divinely ordained order that it was
blasphemy to challenge.

In the Greek city states until about a century before the birth of
Epicurus, securing the obedience of the poor had not been a serious
problem. There had been some class conflict, even in Athens. But
most land was occupied by smallholders, and excess population could
be decanted into the colonies of Italy and the western Mediterranean.
There were rich citizens, but they were usually placed under heavy
obligations to contribute to the defence and ornament of their
cities.

Then a combination of commercial progress and the disruptions of the
war between Athens and Sparta created a steadily widening gulf
between rich and poor. There was also a growing problem of how to
maintain large but unknown numbers of slaves in peaceful subjection.

The result was a class war that destabilised every Greek state. The
sort of democracy seen in Athens could survive in a society where
citizens were broadly equal. Once a small class of rich and a much
larger class of the poor had emerged, there was a continual tendency
for democratic assemblies to be led by demagogues into policies of
levelling that could be ended only by the rise of a tyrant, who
would secure the wealth of the majority  but who could secure it
only so long as the poor could be terrified into submission. Once
they could not be terrified by the threat of overwhelming force,
they would rise up and dispossess the rich, until a new tyrant could
emerge to subdue them again.

Unlike in the monarchies of the near east, no settled order could be
maintained in Greece by religious terrors. During the sixth and
fifth centuries, the Greek mind had experienced the first
enlightenment of which we have record. There had been a growth of
philosophy and science that revealed a world governed by laws that
could be uncovered and understood by the unaided reason.

Now, enlightenments are always dangerous to an established religion.
And the Greek religion was unusually weak as a counterweight to
reason. The Greeks had no conception of a single, omnipotent God the
Creator. Instead, they had a pantheon of supernatural beings who had
not created the world, but were subject to many of its limitations.
They were frequently at war with each other, and so they could be
set against each other by their human worshippers with timely
sacrifices and other bribes. They did not watch continually over
human actions, and beyond the occasional punishment and reward to
the living, they had no means of compelling observance of any code
of human conduct.

And so, when the intellectual disturbance of philosophy and science
spilled over into demands for a reconstruction of society in which
property would be equalised, there was no religious establishment
with the authority to stand by the side of the rich.

The Contribution of Plato

This is a problem addressed by Plato in at least
two of his works  The Republic and The Laws. The first is his
description of an ideal state, the second of a state less than ideal
but still worth working towards. I do not claim to be an expert on
Plato, though am dubious of many of the claims made against him.
However, his general solution to the problem is to stop the
enlightenment and to reconstruct society as a totalitarian oligarchy.

His ideal society would be one in which democracy and any degree of
accountability would have been abolished, together with married life
and the family and private property. Poetry was to be abolished. All
other art and music were to be controlled. There was to be a
division of society into orders at the head of which was to be a
class of guardians. These would strictly control all thought and
action.

His workable society would be one in which some property and some
accountability would be allowed to remain. Even so, there was to be
the same attempt at controlling thought and action.

The stability of these systems was to be maintained by a new
theology. A single divine being would take the place of the
quarrelling, scandalous gods of mythology and the Homeric poems. The
common people could be left with a purified version of the old cults.
But these gods would be increasingly aligned with the secondary
spirits through which the One God directed His Creation.

People were to be taught that the Platonic system was not a human
construct, but that it reflected the Will of Heaven. Rebellion or
disobedience would be punished by the direct intervention of God
through His Secondary Spirits. Before then, though, it would be
punished by the state as heresy. At the end of the fifth century,
Anaxagoras had been exiled from Athens for claiming that the sun was
a ball of glowing rock. This had been an occasional persecution 
indeed, it is hard to think of other instances. In the Platonic
system, there was to be a regular inquisition that would punish
nonconformity with imprisonment or death.(13)

Thus there is at the heart of the Platonic system a "noble lie" 
though Plato may have believed much of it himself. This is of a
religion that looks into the most secret places of the mind, and
dispenses rewards and punishments according to what is found there.
In the old theology, Poseidon had no power beyond on land. Apollo
had none in the dark. Zeus had no idea who was thinking what. The
Platonic God was just like ours. No sin against His Wishes could go
undetected or unpunished.

And so the people were to be kept in line by fear not quite of
hellfire, but by fear of everything short of that.(14)

True Physics

It seems to have been against all this that
Epicurus reacted. For Plato, the world of appearance was a kind of
dream, and the real world was something that only the initiated
could begin to understand through logic and mathematics and perhaps
a dash of magic. So far as it existed, matter was evil, and the
universe was strictly bounded in space and time.

For Epicurus, the world of appearance was the real world. There is a
void, or vacuum, which is infinite in space and time. It has always
existed. It will always exist. It goes on forever and ever. In this
void is an infinite number of atoms. These are very small, and
therefore imperceptible, but indivisible particles of matter. They
have always existed and will always exist. They are all moving
through the void at an incredibly rapid and uniform speed. The world
as we see it is based on combinations of these atoms. Every atom is
hooked, and the collision of atoms will sometimes lead to
combinations of atoms into larger structures, some of which endure
and some of which we can eventually perceive with our senses. All
observed changes in the world are the result of redistributions of
the invisible atoms that comprise it.

Though we are not able to see these atoms, we can infer their
existence by looking at the world that our senses can perceive. All
events  the wearing away of a rock by water, for example, or the
growth of crystals or trees  can be fully explained by an atomic
hypothesis. Since there is nothing that cannot be so explained,
there is no need of any other hypotheses. In a surviving explanation
of his method, he says:

...[I]n our study of nature we must not conform to empty assumptions
and arbitrary laws, but follow the prompting of the facts.(15)

Everything in the universe is made of atoms. We are made of atoms.
Our souls are made of very fine atoms. Our senses work because every
other physical object is continually casting off very thin films of
atoms that represent it exactly as it is. These films strike on our
senses and give us vision and sound. Heat is produced by the
vibration of atoms temporarily trapped in combinations that prevent
them from their natural onward motion.(16)

Whether or not anyone can at any moment think of a likely
explanation, all events in the universe can be explained in purely
naturalistic terms. Assuming atoms and motion, no further hypotheses
are needed to explain the world.

Epicurus was not the first to explain the world by an atomic
hypothesis. That was Democritus (460-370 BC). But he seems to have
developed the hypothesis with a consistency and detail that took it
far beyond anything that earlier philosophers had conceived.

Perhaps his most notable innovation is the doctrine of the swerve.
There are two objections to the atomism of Democritus. The first is
that if the atoms are all moving at the same speed and in the same
direction, like drops of rain, there is no reason to suppose they
will ever collide and form larger compounds. The second is that if
they are not moving in the same direction, they will collide, but
they will form a universe locked into an unbreakable sequence of
cause and effect. This conflicts with the observed fact of free will.

And so Epicurus argues that every atom is capable of a very small
and random deviation from its straight motion. This is enough to
give an indeterminacy to the universe that does not conflict with an
overall regularity of motion.

The Physics Developed

It would be easy to diverge from this general
overview into a detailed examination of the physics. This is because
Epicurus seems to have been largely right. We now believe, as he did,
that the universe is made of atoms, and if we do not now talk about
motion, we do talk about energy and force. His physics are an
astonishing achievement.

Of course, he was often wrong. He denigrated mathematics. He seems
to have believed that the sun and moon were about the same size as
they appear to us.(17) Then there is an apparent defect in his
conception of the atomic movements. Does the universe exist by
accident? Or are there laws of nature beyond the existence and
movement of the atoms? The first is not impossible. An infinite
number of atoms in an infinite void over infinite time will, every
so often, come together in an apparently stable universe. They may
also hold together, moving in clusters in ways that suggest
regularity. But this chance combination might be dissolved at any
moment  though, given every sort of infinity, some of these
universes will continue for long periods.

If Epicurus had this first in view, what point in trying to explain
present phenomena in terms of cause and effect? Causality only makes
sense on the assumption that the future will be like the past. If he
had the second in mind, it is worth asking what he thought of the
nature of these laws? Might they not, for example, have had an
author? Since Newton, we have contented ourselves with trying to
uncover regularities of motion and not going beyond these. But the
Greeks had a much stronger teleological sense.

Perhaps these matters were not discussed. Perhaps they were
discussed, but we have no record of them in the surviving
discussions. Or perhaps they have survived, but I have overlooked
them. But it does seem to me that Epicurean physics do not fully
discuss the nature of the laws that they assume.

On the other hand, let me quote two passages from his surviving
writings:

Moreover, there is an infinite number of worlds, some like this
world, others unlike it. For the atoms being infinite in number...
are borne ever further in their course. For the atoms out of which a
world might arise, or by which a world might arise, or by which a
world might be formed, have not all be expended on one world or a
finite number of worlds, whether like or unlike this one. Hence
there will be nothing to hinder an infinity of worlds....

And further, we must not suppose that the worlds have necessarily
one and the same shape. For nobody can prove that in one sort of
world there might not be contained, whereas in another sort of world
there could not possibly be, the seeds out of which animals and
plants arise and the rest of the things we see.(18)

What we have here is the admission that there may, in the infinite
universe, be other worlds like our own, and these may contain
sentient beings like ourselves. And there may be worlds
inconceivably unlike our own. And there is the claim that living
beings arise and develop according to natural laws. Epicurus would
not have been surprised either by modern physics or by Darwinism.

The Purpose of the Physics

However, while the similarities between Epicurean
physics and modern science are striking, there is one profound
difference. For us, the purpose of science is to give us an
understanding of the world that brings with it the ability to
control the world and remake it for our own convenience. This is our
desire, and this has been our achievement because we have fully
developed methods of observation and experiment. The Greeks had
limited means of observation  no microscopes or telescopes, nor
even accurate clocks. Nor had they much conception of experiment.

Moreover, scientific progress neither was conceived by Epicurus nor
would have been regarded as desirable. He says very emphatically:

If we had never been troubled by celestial and atmospheric phenomena,
nor by fears about death, nor by our ignorance of the limits of
pains and desires, we should have had no need of natural
science.(19)

He says again:

...[R]emember that, like everything else, knowledge of celestial
phenomena, whether taken along with other things or in isolation,
has no other end in view than peace of mind and firm
convictions.(20)

* This is the text of a lecture
given on the 6th September 2007 to the 6/20 Club in
London.
1. Nearly all our biographical
information about Epicurus comes from Diogenes
Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book X.
Diogenes was an otherwise unknown biographer and
compiler of the 3rd century AD. An English
translation of his Life of Epicurus is available at
www.epicurus.net/en/lives.html 
checked August 2007. All quotations from Epicurus
are taken from the translations made available on
this site. Many of these are duplicated in different
versions at www.epicurus.info.
2. "Epicurus was quite a prolific author,
surpassing all in the quantity of books produced.
He authored, in fact, some three hundred books, and
he never cited any other authors  all the words
contained in them were Epicurus' own." (Diogenes
Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, X. 26.)
3. See, among many others, Diogenes Laertius: "He
uses plain language in his works throughout, which
is unusual, and Aristophanes, the grammarian,
reproaches him for it. He was so intent on clarity
that even in his treatise On Rhetoric, he didn't
bother demanding anything else but clarity." (ibid.)
4. Epicurus," Letter to Menoeceus," contained in
Diogenes Laertius, op. cit.
5. Ibid.
6. Principal Doctrines, 8, quoted in Diogenes
Laertius, op. cit.
7. W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals
from Augusts to Charlemagne (first published 1869),
Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1911, volume 1, p. 14.
Lecky is translating Pierre Gassendi, Philosophiae
Epicuri Syntagma, who in turn is summarising the
ancient sources.
8. Principal Doctrines, 27.
9. Diogenes Laertius, op. cit.
10. Plutarch, That Epicurus Actually Makes a
Pleasant Life Impossible, 13, p. 1095C, helpfully
collected by Erik Anderson, Epicurea: Selections
from the Classic Compilation of Hermann Usener(1834-1905), 2005  available at:
www.epicurus.info/etexts/epicurea.html 
checked August 2007.
11. Plutarch, Against Colotes, 17, p. 1117B, in
Anderson, ibid.
12. Adapted from Principal Doctrines, 12.
13. Plato is an incredibly verbose writer in
English translation, and is almost unreadable in
Greek. Finding any useably short quotation to
explain what he appears to be arguing is next to
impossible. But take this on the duty of the
magistrate to punish "impiety": "After the prelude
shall follow a discourse, which will be the
interpreter of the law; this shall proclaim to all
impious persons:  that they must depart from their
ways and go over to the pious. And to those who
disobey, let the law about impiety be as follows:  If a man is guilty of any impiety in word or deed,
any one who happens to be present shall give
information to the magistrates, in aid of the law;
and let the magistrates who first receive the
information bring him before the appointed court
according to the law; and if a magistrate, after
receiving information, refuses to act, he shall be
tried for impiety at the instance of any one who is
willing to vindicate the laws; and if any one be
cast, the court shall estimate the punishment of
each act of impiety; and let all such criminals be
imprisoned. There shall be three prisons in the
state: the first of them is to be the common prison
in the neighbourhood of the agora for the safe-keeping
of the generality of offenders; another is to be in
the neighbourhood of the nocturnal council, and is
to be called the 'House of Reformation'; another, to
be situated in some wild and desolate region in the
centre of the country, shall be called by some name
expressive of retribution. Now, men fall into
impiety from three causes, which have been already
mentioned, and from each of these causes arise two
sorts of impiety, in all six, which are worth
distinguishing, and should not all have the same
punishment. For he who does not believe in Gods, and
yet has a righteous nature, hates the wicked and
dislikes and refuses to do injustice, and avoids
unrighteous men, and loves the righteous. But they
who besides believing that the world is devoid of
Gods are intemperate, and have at the same time good
memories and quick wits, are worse; although both of
them are unbelievers, much less injury is done by
the one than by the other. The one may talk loosely
about the Gods and about sacrifices and oaths, and
perhaps by laughing at other men he may make them
like himself, if he be not punished. But the other
who holds the same opinions and is called a clever
man, is full of stratagem and deceit  men of this
class deal in prophecy and jugglery of all kinds,
and out of their ranks sometimes come tyrants and
demagogues and generals and hierophants of private
mysteries and the Sophists, as they are termed, with
their ingenious devices. There are many kinds of
unbelievers, but two only for whom legislation is
required; one the hypocritical sort, whose crime is
deserving of death many times over, while the other
needs only bonds and admonition. In like manner also
the notion that the Gods take no thought of men
produces two other sorts of crimes, and the notion
that they may be propitiated produces two more.
Assuming these divisions, let those who have been
made what they are only from want of understanding,
and not from malice or an evil nature, be placed by
the judge in the House of Reformation, and ordered
to suffer imprisonment during a period of not less
than five years. And in the meantime let them have
no intercourse with the other citizens, except with
members of the nocturnal council, and with them let
them converse with a view to the improvement of
their soul's health. And when the time of their
imprisonment has expired, if any of them be of sound
mind let him be restored to sane company, but if
not, and if he be condemned a second time, let him
be punished with death. As to that class of
monstrous natures who not only believe that there
are no Gods, or that they are negligent, or to be
propitiated, but in contempt of mankind conjure the
souls of the living and say that they can conjure
the dead and promise to charm the Gods with
sacrifices and prayers, and will utterly overthrow
individuals and whole houses and states for the sake
of money  let him who is guilty of any of these
things be condemned by the court to be bound
according to law in the prison which is in the
centre of the land, and let no freeman ever approach
him, but let him receive the rations of food
appointed by the guardians of the law from the hands
of the public slaves; and when he is dead let him be
cast beyond the borders unburied, and if any freeman
assist in burying him, let him pay the penalty of
impiety to any one who is willing to bring a suit
against him. But if he leaves behind him children
who are fit to be citizens, let the guardians of
orphans take care of them, just as they would of any
other orphans, from the day on which their father is
convicted." (The Laws, X, translated by Benjamin
Jowett  available at:
classics.mit.edu 
checked August 2007).
14. For a short and explicit statement of the
"noble lie," see Polybius: "But the quality in which
the Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior
is in my opinion the nature of their religious
convictions. I believe that it is the very thing
which among other peoples is an object of reproach,
I mean superstition, which maintains the cohesion of
the Roman State. These matters are clothed in such
pomp and introduced to such an extent into their
public and private life that nothing could exceed it,
a fact which will surprise many. My own opinion at
least is that they have adopted this course for the
sake of the common people. It is a course which
perhaps would not have been necessary had it been
possible to form a state composed of wise men, but
as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless
desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, the
multitude must be held in by invisible terrors and
suchlike pageantry. For this reason I think, not
that the ancients acted rashly and at haphazard in
introducing among the people notions concerning the
gods and beliefs in the terrors of hell, but that
the moderns are most rash and foolish in banishing
such beliefs. The consequence is that among the
Greeks, apart from other things, members of the
government, if they are entrusted with no more than
a talent, though they have ten copyists and as many
seals and twice as many witnesses, cannot keep their
faith; whereas among the Romans those who as
magistrates and legates are dealing with large sums
of money maintain correct conduct just because they
have pledged their faith by oath. Whereas elsewhere
it is a rare thing to find a man who keeps his hands
off public money, and whose record is clean in this
respect, among the Romans one rarely comes across a
man who has been detected in such conduct...."
(Histories, VI, 56  available at:
penelope.uchicago.edu  checked August
2007.)
15. "Letter to Pythocles," contained in Diogenes
Laertius, op. cit.
16. This summary of Epicurean physics is taken
from the very full explanation given in Books One
and Two of the De Rerum Natura of Titus Lucretius
Carus. There is also the summary given by Epicurus
himself in his "Letter to Herodotus," contained in
Diogenes Laertius, op. cit.
17. "Letter to Pythocles."
18. "Letter to Herodotus," op. cit.
19. Principal Doctrines, 11.
20. "Letter to Pythocles," op. cit.